I created this second banner because Fiona said the dead Santa one was “horrible.”

Welcome to the blogathon! I’m going to sellotape this post to the top of Shadowplayusing science, so it will be the first thing you see this week. But the new posts will be immediately beneath it, so keep scrolling.

If participating in the blogathon, this is the post to link to. You can add a comment below to let me know about the post, if you don’t have my email.

SUNDAY

And we have a first entry — David Ehrenstein applies his wits to F FOR FAKE, one of Orson Welles’ last movies as director, and another that is sometimes cited as his greatest film. Here.

My own first piece deals with a truly hard-to-see, unconsidered final film, from the wonderful Frank Borzage. Here.

Christine Leteux was our researcher on NATAN, is Kevin Brownlow’s translator, and in her own right she’s the author of the first book on Albert Capellani and the splendid French-language film blog Ann Harding’s Treasures. She’s traveling at present, researching her next book, but gave me permission to link to a relevant piece from AHT — TUMBLEWEEDS was William S. Hart’s last directorial gig and feature starring role. Ici.

A clip from YOYO (1965) by Pierre Etaix (co-written with Jean-Claude Carriere). Comparisons with THE ARTIST may prove instructive. He even has a wee dog!

Etaix worked with Jacques Tati as AD on MON ONCLE, and with Bresson as an accomplice in PICKPOCKET, thus forging a link between two artists who are more closely related than one might think. He split with Tati (to the latter’s visible distress) and became a director-star in his own right. But then all his films fell into a copyright-dispute legal black hole and were unavailable for decades. To add to that, one of his major roles as an actor for another filmmaker is in Jerry Lewis’s still-unseen THE DAY THE CLOWN CRIED.

Etaix’ films only just emerged from their limbo and are available on DVD in France (buy them! not much French is required). Etaix has been jetting around the world to promote them, and seems to have a new lease of life. He’s been acting in more films, including Aki Kaurismaki’s LE HAVRE, and in 2010, at the age of 82, he directed a short.

Tati wanted to cast Etaix in THE ILLUSIONIST — the magician character was more of a seducer than in Chomet’s eventual animated version, and no way could Tati envisage himself in the role. Chomet, in making the magician a Tati-facsimile, had to de-sex the film. Whereas Etaix can do louche! Comparisons with Tati are inevitable, but misleading — Chaplin and Keaton inform the films, but the cinematic and narrative playfulness at times recalls Woody Allen. Really, he’s his own man.

I think you can also see Carriere’s influence, the kind of crazy jokes you get in ZAZIE DANS LE METRO and VIVA MARIA! — jokes which defy common sense, like the one with the footman’s arm holding the light (my favourite).

We are assembling a shimmering pyramid composed of delightful movie scenes that shine out from your memories and illuminate my foggy Edinburgh nights.

A couple people* have been requesting a scene from Bill Forsyth’s LOCAL HERO. Since I, like Forsyth himself (!) don’t own a copy of it, I’m a slave to what’s already on YeTube. Fortunately, though NONE of the requested scenes are available, this one is.

Spoiler alert: it’s the end of the damn movie.

My old mate Lawrie remembered Forsyth in his very early days, making no particular impression on him, which was unfortunate since Lawrie was more or less running the Scottish film industry at the time.

The Times Online has an intriguing piece that does much to illuminate Foryth’s more curmudgeonly aspect. He’s known to be somewhat difficult — volunteering to teach at Edinburgh College of Art, then gruffly denying all knowledge of this — and had a bruising run-in with Scottish Screen, over issues of transparency. I think Forsyth was basically in the right on that one: there was probably no corruption, but it mattered very much that Scottish Screen didn’t seem to care whether people thought there was. The head of that organisation, Eddie Dick, complained to me, rather hurt by the whole thing: “people think Bill is like his films, but there’s a very dark side to Bill.”

Forsyth always found directing agony, and his love of both Bresson and “experimental film” may have pulled him away from his natural talent for comedy. I have a recording of a moving TV masterclass Forsyth gave on Bresson’s AU HASARD, BALTHASAR where he talks with great emotion about the power of the film’s first few minutes, and you get a sense of B.F.’s frustration at not being able to reach the same exalted level: “You know these dreams you sometimes have when you can fly or you can flat down the street three feet off the ground? I remember having a dream about making a film. And it was the perfect film. It’s the kind of dream, when you wake up, you want to remember it, and remember how to do it… and you can’t. In this dream, I had made this film which was perfect, and fluid, and wonderful. I was reminded of it when I watched this film recently because that four minutes is kind of the way I saw the movie in my dream.”

The Timespiece ends with a postcard Forsyth sent the interviewer, where he discusses the crossroads he faced back in the Lawrie Knight days:

“Either I would…spend the following decades tenaciously developing what was finally manifest as the gallery video-installation genre, or I’d make that slow backwards retreat into conventional cinema. We know what happened. To think that I might now have been the grand old man of international video art (probably with a pad in Berlin). Seriously, I don’t think I’d have relished that any more than my present perch as the retiring ploughman poet of Scottish cinema (living up a hill with some trout as neighbours), and with the one residing ambition of wanting to make people laugh.

“So, no regrets. At least I didn’t ever jump headlong into the commercial pool but studiously and cussedly patrolled just the margins. And thankfully I never did stop feeling like an outsider…

“You’ll appreciate that you have only yourself to blame for this letter. You prodded me awake in my cage, and being simply human, my first and only demand is to be understood.

Best wishes, Bill Forsyth.”

Like the scene above, and like much of Forsyth’s work, there’s a happy-sad feeling to this communique: melancholia euphoria?